When your friends call and write and ask, sweetly, if all is well, that’s a sign that you’ve been gone too long. When the people who have been where you’ve been, and know what sort of enormous change has been wrought upon your life, write and ask, sweetly, if you plan on sharing the details of that enormous change any time soon, that’s an even greater sign. But when the comment spammers show up and post gibberish seven times a day, well, that’s when you know you have to send up a flare.

Dear friends, all is well, really well. I have landed safely at law school, where I’ve been a brand new 1L for seven days, dancing with the usual suspects of a first-year law curriculum: Criminal Law, Contracts, Torts, Pleading & Civil Procedure, and the timorous beastie known as Legal Analysis, Research and Writing. I have made some friends, many of whom were in middle school when Lloyd and I got married, but they don’t hold that against me. I won’t lie about the workload: it’s been confounding, and I’m still trying to figure out the best way to manage it. It seems that I either read too quickly, and thus miss a lot of nuance, or I read too slowly and overparse when I could be getting a lot more done. Fortunately I have a study group, and once we get together, I’m sure we’ll all have a lot to learn from each other.

On a happier, or at least more familiar note, our month of living in hotels is almost over. Tonight we take a walk-through of our new apartment and receive the keys from our landlord; over the next couple of days we will bring carloads of stuff from our storage space—oh, wait, did I mention that we have a car now?—and on Friday we will check out of our scary hotel, and, after my last class, we will get the bed out of storage and move in for real. Our new sofa and our cable/internet hookup arrive on Wednesday. Between that, the unpacking of the kitchen utensils and the arrival of my orders from King Arthur and Penzey’s, we’ll *really* get something done around here.

Thank you, dear friends, for being so patient and kind at a time when I’ve been so spacy and disconnected. It’s not been an easy process, but overall, it’s been a very, very good one.